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Javier E

How did 9/11 change the way the world sees the United States? | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...e-way-world-sees-united-states

war terror 9-11 lessons

shared by Javier E on 09 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • ‘With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom’ Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of Making the Arab World (Princeton, 2018)
  • The morning after the terrorist attacks on the US, the French newspaper Le Monde ran a headline which summarised a widespread sentiment in Europe and the world at large: ‘We are all Americans.’
  • There was an outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with the US worldwide, including the Middle East. Even in Iran, which had been under punishing economic siege from the US for two decades, 60,000 spectators observed a minute’s silence during a football match in Azadi Stadium and hundreds of young Iranians held a candlelit vigil in Tehran. Iranian leaders sent sympathetic messages to their American counterparts, the first official contact between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
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  • Instead of building on this goodwill and solidarity, the US launched a War on Terror, the greatest strategic disaster in its history. Thus, the US squandered an historic opportunity to undo the harm of its Cold War policies, which had led to the emergence of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
  • In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States – victor of the Cold War and last superpower standing – suddenly looked vulnerable and sympathetic. Outsiders felt pity but also a sly hope that, after decades of running the world clumsily at arm’s length, the Americans might recalibrate and become a humbler nation.
  • The War on Terror was a war of choice, not necessity. What if the US had used 9/11 as a catalyst to bring about transformative change in its relations with the Arab and Muslim world, rather than doubling down by invading Afghanistan and Iraq? It could have used its soft and hard power to help resolve regional conflicts and invest in human development, making the world safer and more prosperous. 
  • ‘The world continues to get America wrong’ Tim Stanley, Historian, columnist and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph
  • The War on Terror was costly in blood and reputation. The so-called leader of the free world sanctioned torture and illegally invaded Iraq, destroying a state and creating a vacuum that allowed the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS. With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom.
  • The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq looked like repeats of Vietnam: enrolment in US history courses in the UK took off as students, like me, wanted to understand why America kept making the same mistakes.
  • The opposite was perceived to happen: America became more like itself, proud, unilateral, dispensing vigilante justice with a cowboy president (‘some folks look at me and see a certain swagger’, joked George W. Bush, ‘which in Texas is called walking’).
  • ‘That Southeast Asia became the “second front” in the War on Terror was a blunder based on bad intelligence’ Minh Bui Jones, Editor of Mekong Review
  • On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I found myself in Washington DC talking to a well-known author on the legacy of the terrorist attacks. At one point he asked me about Islamic terrorism in Cambodia, where I was living at the time. The question startled me. In the seven years I lived there, I never thought of Islam and terrorism together.
  • That author’s question tells you one thing about 9/11 in relation to Southeast Asia. Mostly, it is paranoia wrapped in ignorance. There are about 300,000 Muslims living in Cambodia today, a little more than one per cent of the population.
  • That this region became the ‘second front’ in George W. Bush’s great ‘War on Terror’ – his administration sent 660 troops to the Philippines in January 2002, following the capture of al-Qaeda operatives in Singapore and Malaysia – was a strategic blunder based on bad intelligence. Of course, Cambodians and their Vietnamese neighbours know all too well where those sorts of mistakes can lead and they would have felt a sense of déjà vu as they watched US bombs raining on Afghanistan and Iraq
  • Growing up in Vietnam in the 1970s, I had an image of the US as impregnable and I wasn’t alone. After 9/11, it looked vulnerable; I’m sure I’m not alone here either.
  • ‘As US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, history threatens to repeat itself’ Elisabeth Leake, Associate Professor of International History at the University of Leeds and author of Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2022)
  • In the aftermath of 9/11, the US led an ultimately failed invasion of Afghanistan that lacked a historical understanding of the state or its inhabitants. American policy planners and military officers seemed destined to repeat mistakes made by other foreign powers in the decades before them. This was not a case of the ‘graveyard of empires’ – itself an inappropriate moniker – striking again. Rather, it was a ready willingness to overlook Afghanistan’s complicated 20th-century history.
  • social scientists supported military personnel in comprehending supposedly incomprehensible Afghanistan. These policies fundamentally overlooked Afghanistan’s complex social and political relations and the dynamic ways Afghan elites and intellectuals had engaged with the international arena for decades. The US itself had fostered some of this modernisation in the era of Cold War competition, yet 21st-century narratives replaced a history of internationalism with a history of parochialism. 
Javier E

Opinion | A new Churchill biography wrongly leans into his faults - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ll-biography-misguided-history

churchill biography morality assessment history Culture

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • “Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road,” G.K. Chesterton said, “but drawing life from them, like a root.”
  • Wheatcroft seems like a single Lilliputian attempting to tie down Gulliver with a single thread. As with Jefferson, the thread will not hold. Such historical figures are more than bit players in our own morality play
  • This is a historical case in which “other than that” doesn’t work. You cannot justifiably say: He was a racist — other than saving Western civilization from an endless night of racist tyranny
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  • And from 1940 to 1945, he stood alone, and then with the United States, to (yes) save the liberty of the world.
  • From 1935 to 1940, as a failed and isolated politician, Churchill was utterly, repeatedly right about the dual threat of German aggression and British pacifism
  • Then, two extraordinary achievements
  • the main accusation against Churchill — like the main accusation against Jefferson — is racism. Did Churchill’s imperialism postulate that the Britons were among the “higher-grade races”? And did this contribute to his disdain for Indians and others? The answer to both questions is yes — with the recognition that such attitudes were not far removed from those of American imperialists in the 1890s who assumed the “White man’s burden” in the Philippines. (Theodore Roosevelt was also a firm believer in racial hierarchy.)
  • The charge that he had a blind spot about India the size of a subcontinent is baked. (“I am quite satisfied with my views on India,” he said, “and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.”)
  • The charge that he maliciously caused the Bengal famine — in the sense that Joseph Stalin caused the Ukrainian famine — seems half-baked.
  • To me, the charge that the author of Gallipoli and Narvik could display terrible military judgment is baked.
  • My best advice is to read the book alongside Andrew Roberts’s invaluable “Churchill: Walking With Destiny” and judge for yourself.
  • Wheatcroft puts every baked and half-baked leftist criticism in one place.
  • a revisionist biography by Geoffrey Wheatcroft titled “Churchill’s Shadow.” Wheatcroft portrays Churchill as the sum of his misjudgments and the embodiment of imperial bigotry
lilyrashkind

6 Times the Olympics Were Boycotted - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...olympic-boycotts

olympics history

shared by lilyrashkind on 16 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Some Games, such as the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, saw countries (including the U.S. and the U.K.) threaten to pull out, before deciding to participate. World Wars I and II forced the cancellation of three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And other countries have been banned for a variety of reasons: Germany and Japan in 1948 because of their roles in WWII, South Africa during the era of apartheid and Russia in 2020, due to a doping scandal (although individual athletes were ultimately allowed to compete.)
  • The Details: Australia’s first hosting stint also marked the first Olympic boycott, with numerous countries withdrawing for a variety of political reasons. Less than a month before the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the Hungarian Revolution against the Communist regime; in protest, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all refused to participate. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China also withdrew—and would not return until the 1980 Winter Games—because Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway province, was allowed to participate as a separate country. And, finally, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the 1956 Olympics due to the Suez Canal Crisis following the British-Israel-French invasion of Egypt to control the waterway.
  • ‘Blood in the Water’: Despite other countries’ boycott against the Soviets, Hungary competed in the Olympics, and its athletes received support from fans, while Soviet athletes faced boos. A violent water polo match between the two teams left one Hungarian player bleeding from the head and led to a fight among spectators and athletes. Hungary, up 4-0 at the start of the brawl, was named the winner and the team eventually won the gold medal. The Soviets, for their part, went on to win the most medals for the first time. Of Note: In a show of peace, the Olympic athletes, for the first time, marched into the closing ceremony mixed together, rather than as separate nations—a tradition that continues today.
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  • The Details: China, North Korea and Indonesia chose to boycott the first Games held in an Asian country after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declared it would disqualify athletes who competed in the 1963 Jakarta-held Games of the New Emerging Forces, created as an alternative multinational amateur competition. The boycotting countries sent many of their top athletes to the Jakarta games.
  • The Details: When New Zealand’s national rugby team defied an international sports embargo against South Africa and toured the apartheid nation earlier in the year, 28 African nations—comprising most of the continent—declared a boycott of the Olympics, which was allowing New Zealand to participate. Led by Tanzania, the boycott involved more than 400 athletes. In a separate action, Taiwan withdrew from the Games when Canada refused to let its team compete as the Republic of China. Of Note: The boycott led to hotel and ticket refunds totaling $1 million Canadian dollars. It especially affected several track and field events, where nations such as Kenya and Tanzania were frequent medal winners.
  • Afghani athletes, notably, competed in the Games. Some countries did not forbid athletes from competing as individuals under the Olympic flag, but American athletes attempting to compete faced losing their passports. A group of American athletes sued the U.S. Olympic Committee to participate but lost the case. The boycott resulted in just 80 countries competing in the Olympics, the fewest since 1956.
  • In retaliation for the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Games four years earlier, 14 nations, led by the Soviet Union and including East Germany, boycotted the Los Angeles-held Olympics. Joined by most of the Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviets said they feared physical attacks and protests on American soil. "Chauvinistic sentiments and anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in this country,” a government statement read.
  • and Joan Benoit, along with Mary Lou Retton, the first American gymnast to win the gold for all-around, became instant stars. And the Games were considered a huge financial success, with almost double the ticket sales of Montreal and earning the title as the most-seen event in TV history.
  • Angered over not being allowed to co-host the Games with South Korea, North Korea refused to attend the 1988 event in neighboring Seoul. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, accepted the IOC's invitation to compete, along with China and Eastern Bloc nations, leaving just Cuba, Ethiopia and Nicaragua joining North Korea in the boycott. “To have the Olympics in Seoul would be like having them at the Guantanamo naval base occupied by the United States," Cuba President Fidel Castro told NBC News at the time. "I wonder that, if Socialist countries refused to go to (the 1984 Olympics in) Los Angeles for security reasons, if really there is more security in Seoul than in Los Angeles.”
  • candals tarnished the Seoul Games, including reports of residents being forced from their homes and homeless people being detained at facilities in preparation for the Games. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson made global headlines when he was stripped of his world-record-setting 100-meter victory after testing positive for steroids, and controversial boxing calls that went against South Korean athletes caused outrage.
  • North and South Korean leaders met following the events, and agreed to send a combined team to the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games. However, North Korea announced in April 2021 that it would not participate because of the coronavirus pandemic. 
Javier E

Lawyer Who Used ChatGPT Faces Penalty for Made Up Citations - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lawyer-chatgpt-sanctions.html

AI legal example penalty hallucination technology

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • For nearly two hours Thursday, Mr. Schwartz was grilled by a judge in a hearing ordered after the disclosure that the lawyer had created a legal brief for a case in Federal District Court that was filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations, all generated by ChatGPT.
  • At times during the hearing, Mr. Schwartz squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with his left hand. He stammered and his voice dropped. He repeatedly tried to explain why he did not conduct further research into the cases that ChatGPT had provided to him.
  • “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he told Judge Castel.
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  • As Mr. Schwartz answered the judge’s questions, the reaction in the courtroom, crammed with close to 70 people who included lawyers, law students, law clerks and professors, rippled across the benches. There were gasps, giggles and sighs. Spectators grimaced, darted their eyes around, chewed on pens.
  • “I continued to be duped by ChatGPT. It’s embarrassing,” Mr. Schwartz said.
  • The episode, which arose in an otherwise obscure lawsuit, has riveted the tech world, where there has been a growing debate about the dangers — even an existential threat to humanity — posed by artificial intelligence. It has also transfixed lawyers and judges.
  • Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for 30 years, said in a declaration filed with the judge this week that he had learned about ChatGPT from his college-aged children and from articles, but that he had never used it professionally.He told Judge Castel on Thursday that he had believed ChatGPT had greater reach than standard databases.“I heard about this new site, which I falsely assumed was, like, a super search engine,” Mr. Schwartz said.
  • Avianca asked Judge Castel to dismiss the lawsuit because the statute of limitations had expired. Mr. Mata’s lawyers responded with a 10-page brief citing more than half a dozen court decisions, with names like Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, in support of their argument that the suit should be allowed to proceed.After Avianca’s lawyers could not locate the cases, Judge Castel ordered Mr. Mata’s lawyers to provide copies. They submitted a compendium of decisions.It turned out the cases were not real.
  • “This case has reverberated throughout the entire legal profession,” said David Lat, a legal commentator. “It is a little bit like looking at a car wreck.”
  • Irina Raicu, who directs the internet ethics program at Santa Clara University, said this week that the Avianca case clearly showed what critics of such models have been saying, “which is that the vast majority of people who are playing with them and using them don’t really understand what they are and how they work, and in particular what their limitations are.”
  • “This case has changed the urgency of it,” Professor Roiphe said. “There’s a sense that this is not something that we can mull over in an academic way. It’s something that has affected us right now and has to be addressed.”
  • In the declaration Mr. Schwartz filed this week, he described how he had posed questions to ChatGPT, and each time it seemed to help with genuine case citations. He attached a printout of his colloquy with the bot, which shows it tossing out words like “sure” and “certainly!”After one response, ChatGPT said cheerily, “I hope that helps!”
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lity-gap-childhood-11672401345

social media psychology research education crisis culture Gen Z mental health defense creativity

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
  • He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
  • Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
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  • What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”
  • Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)
  • Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”
  • Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
  • That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
  • Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
  • Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
  • The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”
  • Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
  • He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
  • Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”
  • To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”
  • He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education
  • I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”
  • University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”
  • 56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.
  • This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
  • Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”
  • The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”
  • something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
  • “this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”
  • Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse
  • “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”
  • Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”
  • By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”
  • Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur
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